Website fiasco will taint legacy

Kathleen Sebelius waited as long as she could. She waited until the Obamacare enrollment season was over, and the once-broken website was so firmly back on track it held up under the last-minute surge.

She even waited for one last high point: her announcement at a Senate Finance Committee hearing Thursday that sign-ups had risen to 7.5 million, thanks to the extra time the Obama administration had granted to people who said they couldn’t finish their enrollments on time.

With her carefully orchestrated departure, Sebelius is leaving the Department of Health and Human Services on her own terms, at a natural breaking point after the enrollment season was finished. But she’s not going to have much control over her legacy, or how she’s remembered as HHS secretary.

For all of the accomplishments Sebelius could have been remembered for — getting the massive pieces of the Affordable Care Act underway, negotiating with the states, writing the complicated rules needed to make its interconnected parts work — the one thing that will always define her legacy is the website disaster that happened on her watch.

“There’s always going to be an asterisk by her name,” said Jim Manley, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Sebelius did bring strong political skills to the job. She was the former governor of Kansas and the daughter of another governor — former Ohio Gov. John Gilligan — but she was also a former insurance commissioner. Those experiences gave her not just the political chops to sit through hours of tough grilling on Capitol Hill, always keeping her cool and sticking to the carefully crafted talking points, but a sympathy for state leaders’ desire for flexibility in the law.

“I will always remember the secretary as a champion of the states as laboratories of democracy,” said Joel Ario of Manatt Health Solutions, who worked on Obamacare implementation as the former director of the HHS Office of Health Insurance Exchanges. “It is ironic that she was done in by her agency being forced to do what the states should have done for themselves.”

Democrats have been privately furious at her ever since the sputtering launch. They’re convinced they’ll lose seats in November in large part because Sebelius didn’t prevent the embarrassment of a federal enrollment website that could barely sign up anybody.

And although President Barack Obama and his aides always publicly expressed confidence in Sebelius, their lack of morale-boosting shout-outs made it obvious how little enthusiasm the White House had for her after the rollout. No one in Washington missed the fact that Obama brought in outsiders, led by management consultant Jeff Zients, to lead the repair effort that finally restored the website.

Obama did defend her on the grounds that, as he told NBC News in November, “she doesn’t write code” — but the defense came across as so halfhearted that it didn’t help her case. She was, after all, in charge of the department that was supposed to be ready to go with the working website Obama had promised.

“That job has been held by some of the most impressive Cabinet officers in history: Wilbur Cohen, Eliot Richardson, Caspar Weinberger, Donna Shalala and Mike Leavitt. Sebelius will rank near the bottom,” said one veteran Democrat. “Thank God the White House sent in a team of outsiders to clean up her mess so she could leave with some dignity.”

The White House did give a nod to Sebelius’s other accomplishments Thursday night, as a White House official noted that Sebelius has “fought to improve children’s health, expand mental health care, reduce racial and ethnic disparities, bring us closer to the first AIDS-free generation and promote women’s health.”

In the bland language of an official readout, the White House official declared that “Secretary Sebelius has overseen one of the most consequential initiatives of this administration” and that Obama was “deeply grateful for her service.”

Some top Democrats did give Sebelius a thankful sendoff. “When all is said and done, Sebelius has lots to be proud of, including the surprisingly strong finish on exchange signups after rocky start,” former Obama strategist David Axelrod tweeted Thursday night.

And one of Sebelius’s most forceful defenders was House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who declared in a statement that “her leadership has been forceful, effective, and essential.”

“Her legacy will be found in the 7.5 million Americans signed up on the marketplaces so far, the 3.1 million people covered on their parents’ plans, and the millions more gaining coverage through the expansion of Medicaid,” Pelosi said. “Beyond the law, her lasting impact will be felt in her work to expand mental health services, decrease disparities across communities, and promote women’s health.”

But for all of Sebelius’s political experience, she could also walk into some fairly obvious political traps. It was Sebelius, after all, who set a goal of 7 million sign-ups for Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges at the start of the rollout, declaring that “success looks like” 7 million customers.

After the disastrous website rollout, the Obama administration spent much of the next six months walking that back and declaring it was never a goal. In the end, the website repairs and the last-minute surge allowed the sign-ups to soar past 7 million after all — but only after a massive repair effort that Sebelius didn’t lead.

Most Republicans gave Sebelius the most charitable tributes they could Thursday night, declaring that she had an impossible job trying to implement what they view as an unworkable law.

But not all Democrats are convinced it was wise for the Obama administration to let Sebelius go, worrying that Republicans won’t be satisfied with one departure and will be even more encouraged to keep the anti-Obamacare drumbeat going. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa noted in a statement that “her tenure as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services may be at an end, but Americans will be dealing with the repercussions of the president’s health law for a very long time.”

If it had to happen, though, Democratic strategists say the Obama administration picked the right timing. The confirmation process for Sylvia Mathews Burwell — the Office of Management and Budget Director whom Obama will nominate on Friday to replace Sebelius — will take at least a couple of months, they say, and it’s better to get it out of the way well before the November elections.

“I’m not so sure this is a good idea, but if it had to happen, it’s better for it to happen now than a couple of months from now,” said Manley.